


I Found You In Words

by im_baby_kiaronna (kiaronna)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Don't copy to another site, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, look I KNOW it's older but let's pretend I came here on the TARDIS mmkay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 16:59:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 10,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19749952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiaronna/pseuds/im_baby_kiaronna
Summary: The Doctor spends a lot of time making excuses. Amy doesn't like excuses. Also, there is a six-dimensional eyeball.A series of oneshots on Amy/11, likely to be AU.





	1. Sweet Nightmares

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes you gotta be sure teen you doesn't ever lose her fic to the scourges of fanf****** dot neht

He's seen her in his dreams so many times, felt her fiery hair and imagined what could have been if she had grown up with him. If he hadn't left her the first time, all those years ago. If he hadn't left her the second time, and the third, and the fourth... and the last time, decades ago even for him.

At first it feels so tantalizingly real. He takes her to the lands that a seven year old girl would love. He protects her from the evil that he had let her older self see. He is the perfect man, and she is the perfect companion. They eat fish sticks and custard together, and she is always young, young and innocent, young and special and separated from Earth.

And then, on the distant beautiful moon of a growing galaxy, he dies. His murderer pulls on his bowtie and gives him a cackling grin, and the Doctor knows.

Then. He lies on the floor of his ship and remembers Amelia, his beautiful little girl. The girl who dreamed from the day they met until the day he finally stopped disappointing her. Until he "saved" her, all those years ago. He had always wondered how one glorious night had placed such undeserved adoration and glowing universes inside of her mind.

"We both know why," the Dream Lord smiles, looking subdued. The Doctor can engage in self-loathing alone.

"It was me," he whispers, because he's living in a dream, has been living in a dream since the ending of forever, when the Scottish girl stepped outside his door.

"Don't be foolish," the Dream Lord snaps, crossing his legs. "You were alone. She was alone. I brought you together. Isn't that what you've always wanted?"

The Doctor remembers her swimming in the skies of one planet, drinking a crimson goblet of liquified laughter, of watching her grow older. Most of all, he remembers the unrestrained luster in her eyes, the way she would jump off of frozen cliffs, her yells filled not with terror, not with joy, nor wild fearlessness. No, there had been a sleepy, unconscious knowledge.

 _I'm always happy to dream of you,_ she had told him once at the tender age of ten when he carried her on his back through the Water Gardens of _Monutpel. It all feels so real._

He cries and watches his own self be repulsed. Because he and Amy Pond have been woven together inextricably, tangled and ripped until he doesn't even know when to start the blame. He has ruined her again, and like before, he's torn holes in her heart as easily as he does in time. Only he could reach across a milennia and wrench her from her rightful place, steal her heart and preserve it in his TARDIS until the rest of the world turned to dust, and _not even know_.

"Her Raggedy Doctor," the Dream Lord laughs, "Oh, she always was a lovely visionary. The man who will rip away at himself until there's nothing left."


	2. Magnificent Tragedy

They've just stopped a populated moon from falling into a system's star at the cost of only an hour of their time, and Amelia Pond is laughing.

"They liked my bowtie," the Doctor insists vividly. "You can't even speak their actual language. The TARDIS was translating it oddly." He pauses in a sulking manner, glancing at his beloved console, and Amy raises an eyebrow, waiting. "Bowties are cool."

She spins onto the console deck, dancing to her own tune, and then the Doctor's voice is low and honest. "Amelia Pond," he says, and something stops her from pressing the button that will turn on the waltz music.

"Doctor," she replies, and he begins up the steps, still fiddling awkwardly with his bowtie. "You're worried," she says then, and he smiles.

"Have I ever been forgiven?"

"For wearing the bowtie? Yeah. The fez, though..." And she stops moving all together, because before her eyes, the smile becomes ancient. Crumbling. A ruin that somehow still curves up, broken and infested with brown weeds, against gravity and time.

"For leaving," he says plainly, and the tears spring to her eyes. She hasn't cried over this since she was thirteen, when she learned to lie to her psychologists. She has cried over beauty and creation, over loss and brutality. It always comes to this, though, this crying over the Doctor. Not over his distance, or his eccentricity, or over everything he's lost, but the simple weeping of a lonely child.

Somehow, the pain has become only worse as she got to know him. He knows solitude and loneliness, the feeling that is as eternal and present as time. And still he isolated her, carved her away from humanity; still he abandoned her.

He is miserable, too. He doesn't need another long-suffering soul to weigh down the TARDIS. He needs his bright and lovely Amelia Pond, and that's what she is.

_You don't ever decide what I need to know._

Oh, but she does.

Amelia Pond then does what she has become so adept at doing, what she finally did to her psychologists. What she did to Rory, when she told him she'd never seen him as more than a friend, and they couldn't get married.

"Oh, Doctor." His eyes are curious and questioning in their pain, just like the man they belong to, but she promises herself. "Yes."

She's never forgiven him. She just loves him, loves him so much that she holds every heartbreaking moment dear in her memory, because it is the most thrilling, the most beautiful, the most scintillating part of her life. On her journey with him, she's seen the worst and the best of the universe. Every tragedy is so exquisite, so unique, that it becomes magnificent.

Once, they had watched a star explode, watched it burn itself alive and not even know. She had cried into his chest, and he had responded in death.

_"This was rewritten by another Time Lord,"_ he had said suddenly, his face a dim oval reflecting the feeble last breaths of pure, glowing energy. " _There would have been a planet that circled this. There would have been an entire sentient race that lived in paradise."_

She hadn't cried then. She had laughed, laughed until she cried, and cried until it all bled together and trickled out of the galaxy like the last, desperate rays of the dead star. And Amelia Pond had known that within the final black silence lay simple life and love.

She chose love.

"Thank you, Amelia," he says softly, and they hug tightly as a pair of stargazing lovers before they become the Doctor and his ginger companion once more.


	3. Similarities

Amy Pond doesn't feel lovely or magnificent.

Rory Williams had been a great man before he had entered the TARDIS, a devoted man. He had grown even stronger after entering the TARDIS, after waiting thousands of years. For her. Fourteen years was a mere dab of dreary blue paint on a wall to Rory's limitless shining sky. She realizes with a start, staring at them both, that Rory is older. Older than her, certainly.

Older than even the Doctor.

He stares at her, the years lurking just behind his young eyes, and she knows that he sees. He sees the way that every hug and touch lasts just a moment too long, has a flicker of depth that goes beyond mere friendship. Certainly, the Doctor is an alien and she his traveling companion, but their relationship is far too familiar to him.

And somehow, the Roman, the man who weathered fire and time to be by her side, can be made weak. Amy's stomach is sick, and still he stares, all knowing. All misery.

He and the Doctor are too alike. Some part of their heart has been swallowed by sadness and ground inside it, ground until the years are just droplets hitting a deep well that resonates with loneliness.

They both know what it feels like to die. They know how it feels to be The Last.

There are differences, but one stands out and shines in the twilight before dawn.

Rory doesn't know how to love any other woman, and the Doctor always will. So Rory stays, and the Doctor will eventually leave, even if it breaks him. He's already broken, and while Rory knows how to piece himself back together, the Doctor never tries. He speeds himself forward and backward in time as though he could escape the moment he's lost her, lost them all.

So Rory stays, and the Doctor leaves.

The worst similarity, the one that she always cringes to remember, is that they both know how to love a woman eternally, desperately, hopelessly; how to love someone they can never fully have.


	4. Directions

They are on the maze planet of Chovsrin, and they are running.

It isn't that uncommon, really, and Amelia Pond runs until her lungs burn and her heart is thumping uncomfortably in her chest, a feeling that's becoming all too familiar. Up ahead, there is an intersection, a choice.

"Left?" She huffs to the Doctor, who is sprinting along jovially beside her. "Right?" With a twinkling sideways glance, he doesn't respond until the last second.

"Backwards," he tells her, and the fiery Amelia Pond is almost furious with herself for how quickly she turns around. She would throw common sense out of the window for this man with a mere flick of his hand, without so much as an explanation or apology. They pass a surprised, angry alien (or at least Amy assumes he's surprised. He doesn't have a face), and the Doctor thumps a pleased hand on her back while his lanky legs continue to fumble around themselves. "Can't turn around in this enclosed space," he explains with a grin. "Only left, right, and forwards at intersections. We've lost him for a while."

"What is this, Pac-man?" Amy gives him a mutinous glare and her legs burn as they continue to pound along the titanium floor. "You mean we could have turned around the _entire time_?"

"Don't be silly, Pond," he says seriously, and that's when she knows that the idea didn't even cross his mind.

"You like running, don't you?" She accuses, and he gives a loud, breathless laugh.

"You like running with me," the Doctor accuses back with a cheeky grin, "Don't I just make your heart pound?"

She flushes a shining red that nearly matches her hair. _From the running_ , she insists to herself. _Speaking of which..._ "If we lost him, then why are we still fleeing like bats out of-"

Another large, swishing creature appears at the end of a side corridor. It is identical to the first, except for one distinguishing feature. It is a bright, choking pink.

"Pac-man indeed," she mutters, and the Doctor makes a tsking noise.

"Perfectly normal, when you consider all of the bio-chemicals-"

"Save yer breath," she barks in her Scottish way, and the Doctor promptly shuts up. And then they run, the Doctor and his companion, through a maze of space and time, until left and right turn into up and down, and they're hopelessly lost. Amelia Pond doesn't care in the slightest, no matter how long or hard they run, no matter how loose the Doctor's grip on her pale hand. She will run to the ends of the universe with this man, run until her young heart is well worn, because the Doctor never wants to stop.

"Left?" She huffs, as an orange creature closes in on them with one intersection ahead. One choice. There's no chance to turn around this time; they've learned, dull of creatures as they are. "Forward?"

"Right," he assures her with breathless calm. Her legs obey him, always will, and she turns in the direction he wishes.

The creature doesn't follow. It swishes and moans straight by, and Amy nearly laughs at its stupidity. And then she cries. Because she's standing before the exit.

And the Doctor didn't turn right.


	5. Letters

He's left her.

Whirling through the space time vortex and being pursued by a legion of pitchfork-wielding seventeenth century peasants nearly makes the Doctor forget that. And when he stumbles into a cave and uses his sonic to seal off a rock passageway, he nearly misses the neat carving in the rock wall beside him. Fortunately and unfortunately for the Doctor, nearly is never enough.

_Doctor,_ the carving begins, just his name, engraved seamlessly into the wet stone, _There's a place set for you. Love, Amy and Rory_

He tries to make it a coincidence. There are plenty of Doctors in the 1600s. There are plenty of Rorys and Amys. But the Doctor knows that coincidence is never coincidence, not in his universe.

He tries to tell himself that he's insane. That works.

Until he collapses the Sartorian government, and written plainly on their silver throne is another message:

_Doctor, Amy ate your Christmas cookie. -Rory_

It would have been centuries old for the Doctor, crumbled into dust, carried far from the dilapidated former home of his former companions. But it makes the Doctor's mouth and eyes water all the same.

Between dodging slime aliens, exploding asteroids, and teaching Tranis children how to play hopscotch (a surprisingly difficult task, considering that they have over 10 legs and not all are completely under their control), the Doctor finds more messages. Some make him smile, some make his throat tighten, and one makes his heart stop in his chest.

_Doctor, Rory is trying to dance. Make him stop, please. Love, Amy_

_Doctor, Amy is making fun of me. You wouldn't want to miss it. -Rory_

_Doctor, I'm wearing a mini-skirt. Love, Amy_

_Doctor, we bought a lakehouse. Love, Amy and Rory_

_Doctor, neighbors saw me eating fish sticks and custard. Told them it was an alien's fault. Love, Amy_

_Doctor, our neighbors are behaving oddly. Did you ask aliens to watch us for you? -Rory_

He feels as though the universe is filled with these callings to him, a memory or joke or affection hidden within each crevice. Somehow, the universe becomes younger. It whispers to him like it used to, invites him to see the world and explore every star.

One day, he goes to the rock wall where River carved her gigantic message, her declaration of love.

Written beneath is something that makes him wish he didn't even have one heart, much less two.

_Doctor, I'm 25 today. I hate you. Love, Amy_

The pain strums deep and sharp in his chest.

So the Doctor finally sits down and writes a reply. It isn't what he does, the Doctor, writing letters. He could visit anyone, anywhere, anytime. There is no need for a letter to preserve and deliver what he has to say. And yet his inexperienced hand scrawls out the simple sentence.

_I love you. -The Doctor_

He slips it under their door one evening, and when he returns to his TARDIS, one of the culprits sits, legs crossed, upon the console, stroking its whirring machinery.

"River," he says, "Why?"

"They missed you. They're my parents, and they're young. They're foolish. They miss you."

"I can't," he states plainly, and she laughs.

"You're a Time Lord," she replies, "Don't ever say that you can't." She swings off of the console and pats his cheek. "Sweetie, she has one last message." He shudders, because he knows what's coming. She leans into his ear and whispers it on warm, newly formed breath. "The Doctor lies. So _prove her wrong_."

She opens the old blue door, and there stands his lovely Amelia Pond, letter in hand, staring at him with her fiery eyes.

"I'm not asking you to stay forever," she says.

"And I'll leave," he confirms quietly, waiting.

She doesn't tremble, his brave girl. "I want you anyway."

He steps out of the TARDIS to squeeze her, to breathe the scent of her hair.

"I'm sorry," he says, and he means it. She hums and burrows her head into his shoulder, his neck.

"Me too," she replies, and he pulls back, a gently puzzled expression on his face.

"...Amy?"

Behind him, he hears a sound he would recognize on any planet, in any time.

"I'm selfish." She shrugs her shoulders and her red hair shifts, her eyes filled with a mischievous satisfaction.

The Doctor's police box is gone, and he knows it won't be back until after Christmas morning.


	6. rambling

Her heart squeezes painfully whenever he's around, and she finally sums up the courage to ask.

"What do your... hearts feel like, because you love someone?"

He raises an eyebrow. "Have you ever fallen into a Blorgian jungle cat trap?"

She snorts, and he scratches the back of his head.

"I guess not. Well, that's all for the best. They do like jungle cats, and finding a human in one instead would probably make them give off that awful stench-"

"Doctor," she cuts in primly, and she's not even annoyed, his Pond, just impatient. The Girl Who Waited, who always waits, who grins when he rambles to himself and rolls her eyes at all the right moments. He wonders briefly if this form of himself blabbers more than the rest, and then he realizes he doesn't care.

He has been with his Amelia for so long that he could trace out the exact expression that settles on her face whenever she doesn't understand a word he's saying. He would have to use one of those excellent pencils with granium infused graphite to capture the glint in her eyes, of course, or the curve of her face. The freckles would need to be spattered haphazardly by the feet of a Chlori flying scorpion-he blinks at the thought of their poison- and her hair... Well, only one flower could possibly produce that sort of ink. If he was any sort of proper artist, it could be hung in a museum and preserved and misinterpreted for all eternity, and perhaps he and Pond could go see it and have a laugh and then... "Any other comparison besides a Blorgian..." Her voice slurs the inflection of their name terribly, and the Blorgians would be set into fits. The Doctor is amused for a moment, and ponders the proper time for a visit, but considering the summer wooden floods- "...jungle cat trap?"

Her expression at these times is not frustration, exactly, but rather a wonder and curiosity so fierce, so explosive, that it makes his hearts...

Ah. There.

"Have you ever had cardiovascular-" He rethinks and corrects "-open heart surgery?" No, that isn't fully it. "While awake?" He's pleased with himself at that one, and then realizes the ridiculous nature of it as soon as it leaves his mouth. Her lips curve up into a smile, and then he thinks that perhaps granium infused pencils won't be enough.

"Uh, no." It tilts upward into a giggle as her last syllable holds. "But I suppose that's good enough, Doctor, I get the jist."

His hearts move again at her, at the lilt of her voice and the way she watches him, listens to him.

_Ohhhh. I always get it wrong at first._

But the Doctor keeps the epiphany to himself.

_Well, if it settles her. It's nothing like that at all. OR a Blorgian jungle cat trap. Hmm. More like a..._

And he loses himself again, until Amelia Pond's hand shudders into his and places them both over her rapidly beating heart.

"This is what mine feels like," she says quietly, and it is a flood of connotation to his ancient mind. She doesn't wait for him to travel the light years to the conclusion, even though he could do it just as quickly as his beloved TARDIS does. "Because I'm in love with you."

Amelia Pond is a complex girl, but he loves her in simplicity just as much. So the Doctor does something special for her, and summarizes the thousands of things he's thinking, the way her hair sounds when it's wet and how her hand still fits into his just as it did years ago, but so _differently_ , the numb panic that swells with her tears, the smell of her laughter-it is grass and abstract art and star swimming and quiet- and the way her anger and hope frame her and make her small self eternal, the way her lips tasted _human_ and _human_ tastes like sorrow and joy swallowed together and forced slickly down the throat, the electricity that resides in her every cell, in every spinning, striking electron, the way she dips her fingers in the bowl of time and takes a lick of custard-

"I love you too, Amelia Pond."


	7. rose

He finds her weeping in a closet on the TARDIS. The Doctor doesn't know how Amy Pond got there, or how long she's sat, tears rolling down her red cheeks and her staring miserably into a soft yellow blouse with flowery patterns.

"Amy," he says slowly, hesitantly. He may be a Time Lord, but she is still a woman. And crying does not bode well for any man. It is also, unfortunately, now eternally "his turn" to handle her.

She stares up at him, strangely silent in her sorrow, her red eyes glancing up, studying him.

"I can't remember," she replies finally, her voice resounding and hollow.

"Remember what?" He kneels, and her lips quiver.

"Rose." He nearly shudders at the very mention, his eyes swimming in quiet fear.

"Amy?"

She fingers the pale fabric in her hands. "I can't remember what a rose smells like."

He strokes her hair and tries to find some response, but he searches his thousand years and finds shreds, every second a tiny pinprick in the life that grows more distant and yet is still there, perfectly preserved.

"We can take you to Earth to get some roses, Amy. It's as simple as-"

"No!" She bursts, and the Doctor is startled and perplexed in a fearful way. Her voice is softer then. "No, Doctor, that's not the point."

He waits, something that comes unnaturally for the Time Lord.

"It's that I can't remember it properly, Doctor. Every time I try to think of it, now, it will be compared to every flower I've smelt, whether it's the Glass Roses of Kluspex or the Talking Lilies of Galspart. It's... _old_ , somehow. Ruined by my own experience." She swallows. "I thought that if I absorbed everything in the universe, it would push out bloody Leadworth and just leave beauty in its wake. But..."

"It doesn't work that way," the Doctor replies, hushing her. "Trust me, it will never work that way." Indeed, looking at the girl before him and noting the irony of the subject, the Doctor is more than trustworthy on the issue. When he remembers Rose, there is guilt. There is melancholy. And worse, there are holes. A Time Lord has an excellent memory, and a TARDIS to fill in the gaps for him. But sometimes, when his brain does stray to her, her scent is wrong. Her voice has the oddest tinge, the feeling that it's off somehow, and even the way she screamed or laughed is inexplicably different. Inexplicably, devastatingly wrong.

Amelia Pond wipes her tears away. "It's a stupid thing to be blubberin' over, I know."

"It's not," the Doctor murmurs wearily, and she looks to him. He cannot erase Rose with Amelia Pond, he knows. He cannot replace every woman in his life with another, cannot keep smelling Talking Lilies or Glass Roses to wash a different scent from his mind. But his treacherous mind is such a creature, such a repulsive thing. It loves Amelia Pond here and now, with his new nose and his new fingers and his new tastebuds. They all ache to experience her, and somehow, he knows that returning to Rose couldn't be the same. Not just because his body has changed, but because of time, the very element he thrives on. Rose is his past, and blast it all, he very much wants Amelia Pond to be his present and future.

So when she smiles, grins at him in that carefree, adoring manner, he has to love her. He has to grin back, and pull her up, and lead her to the kitchen (it takes an hour to find, as it's on the run), and eat fish sticks and custard with her until he can't imagine tasting anything else in his entire life and enjoying it so much, even when he knows in his clenching gut that he will.

Then she leans on the side of her stool to kiss him, and he decides nearly the same thing all over again.


	8. granted

Amelia Pond takes things for granted.

It doesn't matter if that thing is her husband's life or her own, her child, or the Doctor's numerous abilities. Oh, she appreciates it, she does. She gushes and stares wide-eyed at the universe and it does not even look back towards his beloved Pond. She laughs at rituals that are thousands of years old (it doesn't matter _how_ funny their dancing is, the Doctor tries to explain), plucks flowers from the earth that grew by a miracle in the harsh environment, and throws around his random collection of money like it's unlimited (he supposes that it is...). She adores everything he offers her, but she takes it for granted, nonetheless, because she is practically a child. She thinks beauty should exist everywhere, and that it is hers to cherish. The Doctor knows that both of these thoughts are false.

But it is why he has chosen her, this blind child, because there are others- like himself- who feel the weight of the world in their hands and drop its heavy, fiery glow, who cannot handle it.

Amelia Pond cups it in her hands like a firefly, plans to store its wonder in a jar to light her room at night, and the Doctor knows he loves her.


	9. ephemeral

There is a child drowning in the Canal of Sorrows, a barren and deep track that has cracked its way through the dry Arosque landscape.

The Canal of Sorrows is no ordinary expanse of water. It is Arosquian tears, and they have the horrible tendency to preserve a body through its entire natural life process- childhood to ancient death- in paralyzed consciousness.

Amelia Pond is ready to dive, ready to make her way across the glassy ripples to the child, whose eyes are glazing. And then the Doctor has her hair in his hand, that fiery softness he loves so.

"Don't," he says, "There's another way."

She stares into his eyes, hundreds of years etched into their shallow surface, and sees that they are blank. She knows then that there is no other way, because the TARDIS is in the hands of the Arosquian army and the boy out in front of them is drowning, drowning still while she breathes.

The Doctor will not let her swim, and it fills her with beloved fury. He loves her, loves her so much, that he goes against himself.

"Everybody dies, Doctor," she nearly yells. "Everybody bloody well dies, and I _know_ you'll never accept that!" He stares at her, both of their breaths shallow and stuttering, until she speaks again. Her voice is soft and rough and so very Scottish. "But not everybody lives, Doctor, and I need you to accept that. Let's be unique, let's be special, let's be magnificent, let's _live_. We're all just sitting primly in our boats headin' for the waterfall, drinking our tea and telling ourselves that it won't hurt so bad, paddlin' the opposite way, and _please_." She takes his face in her hands and squeezes her eyes shut, a move nearly mirroring and flipping their usual position. "Please, Doctor, I've got to get out and _swim_."

He swallows, and tells her a truth that he knows is a lie. "I cannot lose you, Amelia Pond."

She laughs, and it is a sad thing, to see his Pond laughing so honestly, so plainly. "You can."

She wraps a rope about her waist, stands, and with her hair flowing free, her bright neon shirt and her short skirt, dives straight into the Canal of the Sorrows.

"Unless you come get me," she finishes in a challenge, her ruby lips coated with tears, "You _will_."

He pulls her body in when it's all done, and she lies spluttering and prone on the beach, the child in her arms, her chest rising and falling with air that should never have gone through her lungs. But it does, this Arosquian space, and she is drenched in sorrow.

"Amelia." He holds her, the child between them, and adds his own sadness to the trickle that returns into the sand. He would tear the universe for this woman, a star for every strand of her hair, and it is wrong.

The child comes to life, and Amy grins up at him, bright and breathing even after her swim is over, and the lie he had told burns into truth in his heart.

He will not lose her, will not let her go, won't let something as pathetic as the constraints of one ticking human body come between him and that magnificent soul. He kisses her, and she is laughing, and the Doctor knows their next destination, once he takes back his TARDIS. There are humans that have watched universes swirl into life and collapse into death, lived with them for longer than an eternity, and his Amelia will be one of them. No longer will she be ephemeral, and no longer will he be afraid to let her live.


	10. eternally

Immortality must have a price.

The Doctor tells himself this until he turns as blue as his TARDIS. And then he looks at Amy, his Amy, the girl with the fiery spirit that burns up her fragile body into ashes, and he knows he will pay it.

They go to new planets, ones even the Doctor has only briefly seen, all under the careful guise of adventure. The Doctor is rarely so delicate, but Amy is melting glass, and so he is. He almost finds what he needs on the distant world of Traxafin, but he sees its damage, its horror, and he can't.

So one day, when Amy sleeps soundly, he sacrifices his study, and they are in an alternate universe. It is not an elixir, or a fountain, or anything as glorious as has been told in Earth's mythology, or mythology on any other planet.

"You love her, that young creature," one alien says sadly, and he can only keep his lips in the same place, try not to move, to paralyze everything into a moment, a moment where he has her eternally. "So young, and so close to death."

"Do you know how to make it stop?" He asks, and he is almost dubious. It will be another fairytale, and his Amelia Pond cannot live a thousand of them. She laughs.

"Death never stops. You know it, and so does she, even as young as she is. Children accept it most of all, don't you realize, because they don't need to deny it. That's why they don't cry, Doctor." He is ready to start the TARDIS once more, to make his blue box continue on its way to find forever, when she places one hand on his arm, and she is young. "It's poison." He stares at her, not in surprise, and the Doctor understands. "It's poison, and she'll live, but all she'll want to do is die."

They look at each other, and the Doctor knows that like him, time has battered her within instead of on her outside, and it makes him want to cry in joy and sorrow.

"I'm nearly a thousand years old," he says, "And I love her."

She smiles, and it cracks her face.

"I'm three thousand years old," she replies, "And if you teach me to die, I'll teach her how to live."

The Doctor doesn't carry a gun, or poison, or a murderer's heart. But he knows how to kill. He knows how to kill without any of those things, and it freezes his heart.

So she is dead, and Amelia Pond lives.

She doesn't know, not at first. The key was nothing extraordinary, and all she knows is that they returned to their own dimension after that planet.

She finds him a week later, a week of no adventures. She has gotten lost in the maze of the TARDIS more times than she can count, and she is starting to wonder if her Doctor could have left her, if the other dimension had changed his mind.

Amelia almost passes the door. It is plain and white and tiny, a closet. The door across the hallway is quite literally on fire, the floor is made of stars, the ceiling of flamboyant velvet, and it is in her moment of awe that she realizes one thing does not fit.

And Amelia Pond opens that door, and she finds him. It is beseechingly plain, the room, and quiet. There is a raised bed in the corner, small, and missing a pillow. There is a bowl of fruit set atop one wooden dresser, a fez thrown haphazardly down next to it, and her Doctor lies prone on the carpeted floor. His eyes are shut tight, and she almost believes him to be asleep, but his grip upon his sonic is tight and trembling with stress. It could be mistaken for any ordinary room in Leadworth, but it feels... inhuman.

There are no pictures. She realizes that this is what is wrong, this is what makes her throat close at the sight of it. The Doctor is so vibrant, so utterly mad, and this place that he escapes to is sealed shut, sucked dry. He should have so many pictures, so many moments plucked fresh from time, so many mementos. He should have whirring machines and mud tracked all over his floor. A thousand years should be here, memorialized in one room, bigger on the inside.

His head turns, and it's like he doesn't recognize her. "She let you find me."

She tucks a strand of red hair behind her ear and steps lightly, hesitantly, over to him, standing above him until green eyes lock with brown. "So this is where it all happens, yeah?"

He pauses, and his words are dry. "Yeah."

They're both quiet for a moment, but Amelia isn't one to wait for an answer, not when it's practically tangible on her fingertips. How could such a girl wait for him?

"Did I do something, Doctor?" She pulls on her shirt, so blazingly green in the white room. "I haven't, well, seen you. In a week."

He breathes out. "Lay down." She smirks.

"What, no exploding ship to save or evil aliens to destroy?"

"What's the rush, Pond?" She settles next to him, her expression still delicate, an expanding ripple of emotion. Because her Doctor is always leaving and going, always breaking someone's heart, always late, because time means so little to him. It is something to be thrown about and accidentally washed in the laundry, a soggy thing that is an annoyance to lose but not a tragedy.

And now he's lying on a carpet with her in a room so bland and silent, they could be dead. Neither of them have ever been happy that way, and they never will be.

"Something happened," she says finally, and he buries his face in one green shoulder and cries. So lonely, all of the time, all of those faces and heartbeats and births and deaths and blood and smiles and sacrifices and life and _God_ , he is still _lonely_ and it all comes down to one little room floating in the middle of nothing, empty but for two.

"I've ruined you," he says finally, when they are wrapped in one another and she is crying with him. "Because I love you, and I want you to live, and love me, and love everything."

"That doesn't ruin anyone, you idiot." He pats her cheek like a child.

"You'll know someday."

It is so assured, such a plain and lifeless fact, that it makes Amelia Pond want to scream.

And yet. And _yet_. The Doctor was stating a fact. He wasn't dodging, wasn't avoiding, wasn't blabbering about his friends on the third southern moon or the interesting beetles on Gaenor Fli^d. The Doctor was saying that someday, somewhere, she might begin to understand him and his blue box. That Amelia Pond might be the girl to press a kiss to the universe and know how to make it blush into life.

"Everyone wants to die, Pond, don't you know?" She can only shake her head.

"No, I have no bloody idea what you mean."

He stares at her then, lets those old eyes roam over her face, her hair, her pale white hands that rest on his chest.

"It makes everything else beautiful," he says finally. "So much to do, Pond, and it makes you chase it and it makes your heart pound. And you can love it because someday, it won't be there anymore, and that makes it precious. Love is just missing something before it's gone."

She cries too, then. Love means something different to her beloved raggedy man, and it tears at the heart. She wipes her eyes and smiles anyway, smiles at the heat and the rip of it, because she has something to rip, something that makes her heart beat.

"So do you love me?"

He stills. The curve of her grin lures her salty tears into her mouth, and Amelia Pond doesn't know what else to do. She doesn't have the feel of him, the time that's brushed over his skin and made it rough. But she trusts him, and she loves him, and that will be enough until they learn from each other.

"You'll never be gone, Amelia Pond. And I'll love you till then."


	11. counting

It has been 3 days, 2 hours, 46 seconds, and 29 milliseconds since the Doctor let Amelia Pond step into his blue box. He can taste it on her, taste the leady white picket fence paint of her old life and then the breathtaking alien one of his TARDIS, of her in his TARDIS.

It has been 3 days, 2 hours, 46 seconds, and 29 milliseconds, and the Doctor knows she will be different than anyone he's ever known.

It has been 6 weeks, 6 days, 22 minutes, and 34 milliseconds. Amelia Pond is laughing, and the Doctor knows he is in trouble, because it makes him forget. He shouldn't, he _can't_ , God, he's got near perfect recall. But just sound waves in the air and her mouth open wide, pink tongue concealed behind white teeth, and he forgets that Clox is burning beneath them as they leave, burning because they couldn't stop it. They could save the people, but they couldn't save their planet. They're all homeless, wandering souls like him, and it doesn't even matter, because his ginger human is grinning, her lips against his ear. We did something great today, Doctor- _cheer up, you old bore_. It has been 6 weeks, 6 days, 22 minutes, and 34 milliseconds, and the Doctor is laughing too.

It has been a year, exactly, when Amelia Pond spills her tea in her lap and curses loudly, with color as vibrant and fiery as her hair. "I don't understand why the British obsess over this," she scolds into the air, but as she dabs at her skirt with a towel, she looks at him, and in these bland moments, even in those, he knows. It has been a year, and the Doctor, the Last of the Time Lords, has fallen in love with a human again.

It has been 4 years, 7 months, 3 weeks, 4 days, 28 seconds, and 19 milliseconds. Amelia Pond is yelling at him, because they are dangerously close to Leadworth, dangerously close to her timeline, and she is frightened. Give the girl a monster, a laser shooting metal contraption that can rip a hole in time, and she will run for it with open arms. Bring her close enough to see the roof of her own home, and she breaks, screaming and throwing anything she can lay her hands on in the console room. He has never seen her this furious before, this utterly insane, and so he stands still and lets pieces of his machine hit him, lets her fling old artifacts and slam doors that he didn't even know existed. Then, when she finally calms, has dissipated her frenzy into the void, she reappears.

It has been 4 years, 7 months, three weeks, 4 days, 2 hours, and 55 minutes, and Amelia Pond tells him that she loves him, and that she understands if he wants her to go, but she will fight him. It has been 4 years, 7 months, three weeks, 4 days, 2 hours, 55 minutes, and 30 milliseconds before the Doctor is kissing his beloved companion, and wondering why he never did so before.

It has been 10 years, 8 days, and 3 minutes when she turns to him, eyes alight, the setting suns and the twin planet dipping into the green skyline of Metrisque behind her, and tells him that she doesn't think she has enough time. He gives her a dying smile, watching the tears form shining cracks in the corners of her eyes, and promises her that they will make use of every single moment of it. He will make her life mean something. She shakes her head and grips at him, trying to form the words she means from her desperate lips, but she can't. So he holds her and they watch the pitch black night heal the red scar of the horizon. It has been 10 years, 8 days, and 4 hours, and then the hillside is empty and the TARDIS has left Metrisque for the last time.

It has been 21 years, 30 days, 16 hours, 46 minutes, 23 seconds, and 39 milliseconds. Amelia Pond is dying on the TARDIS floor, and even as he runs and races, throwing levers and making the blue box whirr into any time, any place that can save her, he knows that there is none. So he collapses beside her, sobbing even when she doesn't, even while she smiles at him with red lips and dirt streaked face. She is still his beautiful Amelia Pond, fresh off the pages of a fairytale, but now he holds the book in his hands and knows that even if he refuses to read it, refuses to look, there will still be an end, black ink at the flip of the crinkling page. _Doctor_ , she whispers, lifting the hands that have saved him a thousand times, from not the universe but from himself. They rest on his face.

"I'm so sorry, Pond," he gasps into the air, "I made a promise and I broke it again, Amelia, but I love you, please don't leave me." He still remembers Metrisque, the stunning stretch of sky and his Amelia in his arms, begging the unforgiving universe for a place. "You were real to me. You were important to me. I hope you feel infinite, Amelia, I hope you know that every star is out there because you spun it into the sky and breathed into its embers, I- I hope you felt you had enough time." This is the first striking of pain across her features since she began to die.

"That's not what I wanted," she says softly, her thumb on his lips. "I wanted enough time to change you, to make you see."

"I don't understand," he cries, and it's with everything he has left.

It has been 21 years, 30 days, 16 hours, 54 minutes, and 55 milliseconds. There will only be a minute more, and the Doctor clings to its sliding existence in his hands and thinks that he never appreciated this, that he has wasted every second not spent loving her.

She smiles and kisses him fiercely, and she is blazing with final hope. "I love you," she says, "But you know that, Doctor. Everybody can fall in love. I want you to know what it's like to breathe, to live without watching it all the time, to exist. You'll do it for yourself, won't you, not for me?"

It has been 21 years, 30 days, 16 hours, 54 minutes, 58 seconds, and 3 milliseconds. He wishes he could die with her, he wishes she could live with him, he wishes it all at once, and it makes his heart burst in paradox and desire.

She says her last words against his lips, her air in his mouth.

"Stop counting, Doctor."

5 seconds since she has left him, and he feels his body go numb, before he can feel hers go cold.

24 seconds.

6 minutes and 48 seconds.

He buries her somewhere in the black behind the stars, because she doesn't belong in Leadworth. He doesn't care where the body goes; she isn't there anymore. She has left the universe she so loves. She goes into the ground and it has been 1 hour, 23 minutes, 8 seconds, and 14 milliseconds.

She didn't leave him a letter, not a word, but he finds it when it has been 3 days, 4 hours, and 2 seconds, a little girl's suitcase in her room. It has a blue watch in it, and it is broken.

_I love you_ , she had said. _But you know that_. It hadn't even been important to her, that love that dominated her every atom. That hadn't been what she had wanted.

So the Doctor returns to Gallifrey, and he doesn't know how long it's been, he doesn't know how long it will last, but he brings them back, all of them, and watches time crack, minutes and seconds folding into one another, becoming tangible, and then never existing at all.

It doesn't matter. He doesn't care.

Even without his Amelia, he is not alone, and it is because of her. She still is with him, reaching across ever shrinking time- the Doctor pulls the lever in his blue box, and he lives as time dies.


	12. just stay

It takes forty five hours to find the last Trelos _i_ egg among the rubble of the third moon. The Doctor twirls his screwdriver till his fingers are sore, and Amy stuffs hers in her ears, until they attract the attention of every carnivore in the area. But they find it. And the Doctor promptly sweeps her away to the Blest Jungles of 3042 to celebrate. Amelia dozes, cheek in palm, while he lankily teaches the natives what she knows to be the funky chicken and what he swears was a religious ritual from times long past. The Blest Jungles has two suns, on opposite sides, dim embers that cast a permanent twilight, and her Doctor spins with them till he collapses breathy and fevered in her arms.

"Bedtime, mister," she tells him.

"It's five o'clock somewhere, Pond," he replies with a drunk joy, and she rolls her eyes.

"Since when am I the responsible one here?"

"Since apples."

But he lets her pull him back into the TARDIS without much of a fight, lets her pull the covers over him and kiss his hair like a child.

He sleeps, and Amelia Pond sits in the console room alone. She isn't often afforded this chance, this contented privacy. In her childhood she had fled from it, cried when she sunk into it unwillingly, run to Rory and Mels a million times. Now she sits. Alone. It is quiet, save for the familiar whirring of their beloved TARDIS, the rush of water as the pool changes its place in the library. It relieves Amelia Pond just as it crushes her- there is a frantic hum overtaking her mind, her throat closing desperately to try and seal out the wail, but it escapes.

She hasn't been alone and safe, alone and content, for nearly a year. She has not cried like this, cried until the weight pooling in her stomach drags her to the floor and she is clutching frantically at her clothing, for nearly a year. Crying in front of him is against everything she knows- for she is Amelia Pond, glorious and human and so touchable. The Doctor is her closest friend, her confidante, and she can tell him nothing- not when she knew he was going to die, not when she knew _she_ would die, not when she first fell in love with him, not the second or the third. Her love for him never ends, but it can begin again and again, and sometimes she wishes it would break her but it doesn't, it pushes her on. Amelia Pond never gives up, but she knows how to stay quiet.

When she can't cry anymore she simply lays, revels, knowing she does not have to project a boundless self. Nobody wants to kill her. Nobody is depending on her. No one is there and expecting. Sometimes when the Doctor looks at her she recognizes the glaze in his eyes- she is a fixed point in time and he is watching her unravel hopelessly, helplessly, until she reaches the end, and then he'll open his magnificent TARDIS door and leave her where she belongs. He'll put her back in her little home in her little village, and she'll die surrounded by friends and family, grandchildren that will never know that she has held a planet in her palm or a sword to a villain's throat to protect a single man.

"Amelia," a voice says, low and gentle and always curious. Her face is blotchy and her hands reveal a raw red from rubbing away tears. She should have known- he hardly slept at all.

"I don' wanna talk," she tells him, "I won't."

Always, he picks her apart. Yet this time, the unruly brown head disappears, and only returns when there is a blanket slung over his arm, a steaming mug of hot tea in his hands.

"I'm sorry."

Sipping at the heat, she chokes down laughter. "Quite the egoist, aren't you?"

"No, Amy. I'm sorry." Etched in his face is ever present understanding, age old sympathy, and the fury rises before she can even comprehend its source. "Just let me-"

"Why do you always try to _fix_ me?" She hisses. "Am I broken to you, Doctor? Am I not allowed to cry, to feel sad and lost and- and insignificant?"

His expression is caught- somber and apologetic, surprised and torn.

"I can't leave you like this." Perhaps his throat is closed like hers, perhaps his eyes sting. But Amelia Pond has done her crying.

"Then stay."

He kneels, taps his fingers erratically along the blanket that bathes her shoulders, twists his bowtie.

"I'm supposed to watch you suffer, my Amelia Pond?" He has seen so much.

"No," she half laughs, half cries, "Just stay with me. Just see it and... don't run. Don't leave. Don't you dare be my hero. When I'm all used up and cracked open, just- stay."

He wraps his arms about her, and he does.

* * *

It could be hours later when the phone rings. He looks to her and she waves a pale hand dismissively.

"It's the President of Seembur," he says after some garbled conversation, "Apparently when you trade goods with another solar system you should really check and see if the groceries are sentient or not."

"What planet's that on?" She questions and he humphs.

"Seembur's a three planet quaternacy," is the rapid explanation, and when she eyes him he ploughs on. "Oh, governments only get more complex in the future, Pond. But a three planet quaternacy, honestly. They're begging their cores to rebel. Well then. We'll set off first thing tomorrow."

"We're not goin' now?"

There is silence, and their gazes don't meet. His hands find their way to her cheeks, his lips to her hair. "They won't know the difference."

The laughter bubbles up in Amy and she pulls him against her, dusty tweed and the rocky scent of magma, the heaviness of rain.

"I thought we were being sad, Pond," he scolds, admonishing and muffled by her shoulder.

"I'm a fiery redhead," she rebuffs, "And a woman. I don't play by any set of emotional rules- I can be everything at once." He huffs his agreement, she pulls on his ear in retaliation, and they stand together in a shaky heap.

Five minutes later, and the TARDIS door is open to the second planet of the esteemed quaternacy of Seembur.

"Doctor," she ventures from the doorway, one hand in his, one foot inside and one out. "I'm sorry-"

"Don't," he interrupts swiftly, surely. Two planets loom behind him, the red sun shines on his face, and Amelia Pond is in love. He squeezes her hand. "Just stay."


	13. excuses

Amy doesn't like to make excuses. Amy doesn't like to hear excuses.

Amy has just stolen a Roxxene's third eye. The Doctor is roaring to her in fits of excitement and scathing babbling: " _Amelia_ , I told you to go _back to the TARDIS_ and- it can be removed? Of course it can be removed, stupid, stupid, stupid, it's got a neutrino field a mile wide so it can communicate with the mainframe, removal is probably its main point- imagine the possibilities, Amelia- it's not a problem and- _NO_ AMY that is a problem _don't carry it over there_ \- humans! Oh, yes, take the the six dimensional complex field manipulator and lob it straight into a gravity well, it's like nobody understands Solomon's Theory of Permanence anymore-"

"Stop yer yappin!" She hollers between gasping breaths, "Some of us need to use our lungs for oxygen! You've got three minutes till that thing comes followin' me, so I suggest that you-"

The floor promptly disappears, and they are hurled into a place Amy labels I-Don't-Know-What's-Happening-And-It-Smells.

"What'd you _do_?" She questions the Doctor, flabbergasted, and he rolls his eyes.

"Don't look at me, Pond, that was ALL you. All you, and the six dimensional complex field manipulator."

"But it's an eyeball," she protests confusedly, and tries to hand it to him, but he throws his hands up like she's offered him a hot coal or an angry Quaffelump.

"No no no no no, Time Lords and multi-dimensional affectors do not mix well. Actually, they mix extraordinarily well and that's the problem-anyway! Focus, Pond, focus. Just because it blinks like an eyeball and looks at you like an eyeball and is... sticky like an eyeball doesn't mean it actually functions as an eyeball-"

"Well I can't be- just holdin' it in my palm if it's that important, right?" The Time Lord and his companion stare at each other for a few moments. Amelia lifts an eyebrow impatiently and gestures with her occupied hand.

"I don't see a problem," he interjects into the silence curtly, with a shrug, "You've held onto things that unpredictable before with fairly positive results. Now, let's take a look at you, you beauty..." The Doctor is talking to one heaving wall of wherever they've ended up. "I've got it. We're inside its tail! Roxxenes have hollow tails, you see, makes for-" Briefly, Amelia tunes him out and wonders how such a large creature can have such a small eye. The Doctor is running his hands up and down the walls, blissfully ignorant of how slime covered they are.

And then, around one pink bend appears two lights. It's men- well, Amelia thinks they're human men- and at the sight of the Doctor and Amelia they look positively stricken.

"Oh," they say, "You've got eaten up too."

"We're in the stomach," Amy concludes with a grin, and the Doctor coughs.

"I'm the Doctor," he introduces, "And this is my companion, Amy."

"Doctor who?" One of the men questions, and Amy doesn't even bother to answer, just as she knows he won't. He winks at her, and she takes one slick hand in her own.

"Doctor," she complains, trying to avoid the urge to wipe her hand off on her skirt, and he cheerfully plows on with her, clutched tight, now followed by the two men.

"You've got to have a name," one of them is insisting. The other is too busy shielding his torch from the dripping of the ceiling. "Rob, Alexander, Joe?"

"Joe? Nah," the Doctor replies with a grin, and Amy laughs.

"He's a bit too eccentric to have a name like everyone else."

Eventually, the Time Lord and his companion take pity on the men- they're hungry, and apparently have been swallowed for six hours now.

"Don't worry," the Doctor explains, "We weren't swallowed. This eyeball brought us here, you see it- yes, Amy's got it, wave with it Amy- and I'm certain it won't stay here for long. When it leaves we'll all go with it, and you two can get back to whatever it is you do outside of stomachs."

"Really, don't worry," Amy soothes, "He's the Doctor. He's been through this sort of thing before, and we're going to be fine."

Four hours and a couple of inches of acid later, they are not fine.

"Amy," the Doctor starts conversationally, as they skirt a pool of green liquid ten feet wide on the floor, "Why did you steal the Roxxene's eye?"

Amy wants to say, 'Is that really important now, Doctor?' But she has found that with the Doctor, everything is important, whether orange is a villain's favorite color or whether it rained last Tuesday.

"I don't know. It was just looking at me, shiny and small and everything, and I just wanted to- take it. The creature was so big and it was chasing you, so I thought it might help."

"New theory," the Doctor says excitedly, "The eye serves as a luring mechanism for prey!"

"So we're in the Roxxene's stomach because the eye _wanted_ us here," Amy realizes, putting it together in a way the Doctor as of yet hasn't.

"Oh, the Roxxene has a mouth of its own to swallow prey with," the Doctor smacks one hand to his forehead, "Of course, of course, the babies don't develop mouths till puberty. We're not in a Roxxene's stomach- we're in its _baby's_ stomach. Goodness, of all the things to evolve a space-time manipulator for, feeding your kids is not high up on the list! Admirable. And it must have another one in the mother's stomach so the baby can share that food too, very interesting..."

"We're in the stomach because the eye _wanted_ us here," Amy repeats gravely, "DOCTOR."

"New theory," the Doctor says, going pale, "We need to get out of here on our own before digestion begins."

"Doctor Joe-Nah," one of the men starts fearfully, "Are we getting out?"

"Trust me," the Time Lord replies, clapping a hand on the man's shoulder.

"He's the Doctor," Amy finishes. The Doctor lies. Amelia Pond lies sometimes too.

But not this time. Fifteen minutes later the four of them are twenty feet in the air- the baby Roxxene has a blowhole, apparently.

Soggy and laughing, they stumble back into their TARDIS- and then clothes are off and being wrung out, and Amy discovers a room that serves as a great blow-dryer ("This is the reserve engine collaborator room, Amy, why are you- _don't hang your skirt up there Pond_ \- Pond don't touch that- Amy _I need that-"_ And finally, most indignantly, " _Amelia_! I can take those off myself, thank you, I am a thousand years old!").

When the two are dry and being swallowed up by two plush couches instead of an alien, Amelia watches her Doctor with soft eyes and wonders if he has run out of suspenders. His white shirt looks crisp and nearly professional without them and his beloved tweed.

"It would have taken years to evolve a mechanism like that- assuming that they're not intelligent enough to build such a thing! Whoo, am I ever glad I have a mouth, Amelia, I quite like them and how very three dimensional they tend to-"

"I have a mouth," Amelia interrupts innocently. Her Doctor shuts up immediately. "I think I'll put a kettle on."

Five minutes later they are steeping tea and the Doctor is stirring his quite often, because without his bow tie there's nothing to fiddle with nervously.

"So," Amelia says, "I think I was promised something this morning."

"Was it a planet? I have tried not to promise you planets, Pond, that hasn't ended well in experience."

"It wasn't a planet," she replies patiently. "I do believe I was promised a kiss this morning."

"I've been busy," he exhales. "Very, very busy. Trying not to be digested."

"Interesting." Amy hates excuses- and the Doctor knows Amy very well. "I was also promised a kiss yesterday afternoon."

"Also busy, very busy. If it's not being digested it's firing explosives and redirecting morning traffic! You know how it is."

"Interesting," Amy hums. Sips her tea. "Don't drink that. You'll burn yourself."

"You're drinking," he says, almost accusatory, but he sets down his cup.

"I run hotter than you do."

Physiologically, Time Lords do have a lower body temperature. The Doctor scoots over on his couch, and Amy hauls herself from her cushions and settles in under his open, waiting arm. He smells differently without the tweed- clean and unidentifiable, but definitely like home.

"If I remember right, I've kissed you quite a few times."

"You have," the Doctor agrees simply.

"And not once, between being chased by homicidal alien dolphins and journeying back to my modern day to babysit 'Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All' have you ever, _ever_ kissed _me_."

"Busy." He doesn't meet her eyes. Briefly, she wishes he were wearing his ridiculous suspenders so she could snap one.

"I could have died today," his arm tightens on her shoulder, "I could have been transported by the eye without you. Ended up in a baby's stomach all by my lonesome."

"You would have been brilliant," the Doctor rushes out, "You could have-"

"Shut yer _mouth,_ Doctor. I would have been brilliant. Brilliant isn't always enough. I could have died, which I didn't even think about till I was laying on that couch, and all I knew was 'he's never even kissed me,and I'll never know what that's like.' I just stole a Roxxene's eye. I am a time traveler. I am a KISSOGRAM. And I don't even know what if feels like to be kissed by the man I love, who claims he loves me?"

"It's hard to explain. To... understand."

"I am going to _bite_ you."

"Which is quite possible because you have a mouth, Amy, see how you should appreciate them?"

"I appreciate them more than you," she huffs. "And really? We're going through this again? Sure, I don't understand you- you know a billion languages and were born a thousand years before me, or maybe even after. You've got a pet stegosaurus- yes, I know about him- in your laundry room. You have founded cultures I've never even heard of. On Tuesday mornings at breakfast you like to talk in iambic pentameter. So yes, Doctor, I doubt I'll ever understand you completely, or why you refuse to cross the lip boundary- but I love you. And you love me. We are responsible and stable and- _stop laughing you stupid alien_ \- committed. So. No time to be scared. Kiss me or walk away."

"Okay," he replies, breathless and unsure and almost rebellious, like he's about to break a promise to himself. "Okay."

It would be nearly impossible to escape those couch cushions anyway.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, a goat from the mountain of Rittat calls.

"Phone," Amy says hazily. "That's definitely a phone."

"Your neck tastes like _oranges_ ," the Doctor enthuses in reply. "Did you know that?"

"I can't lick my neck, Doctor."

"Well, you really should try."

She laughs. "I think I have a more realistic idea."

Two seconds. "Wha- _Amy_. Not ready-Amy, I was doing that to you-" a sucking in of breath "-Amelia _no biting_ -"

"Retribution," she says smugly. "Now get the phone."

He does, quickly, after a lanky stumble in the wrong direction. He picks up the ringing device and puts it to one red ear.

"Busy."

Amelia likes this excuse.


End file.
